I get the following question very often. What are the best practices for creating an enterprise reporting policy as to when to use what reporting tool/application?

Alas, as with everything else in business intelligence, the answer is not that easy. The old days of developers versus power users versus casual users are gone. The world is way more complex these days. In order to create such a policy, you need to consider the following dimensions:

You will then need to come up with an 8-dimensional (or more) matrix (good luck 🙂 ), where at each intersection you need to indicate first and second choice for a specific BI tool/app best fit to address each use case. Did I miss any dimensions? Also, when and if you come up with something like this, or even as you are experimenting with prototypes, I’d love to see them and comment.